About Pay on Demand - the dialogue way of doing business - and the first implementation: attention as a product.
First published on www.ecademy.com / clubname=intellectualize$
Currently running several Ecademy clubs: attention as a product, belief management, the creativity network.
Legend: PoD=Pay on Demand, ATTN=Attention, PG=Personal Growth, EU=EuropeUnited(.org)

About Me

Wednesday, May 25, 2005

I recently learned something exciting about words. It was something that i picked up from L.S. Vygotsky's book Mind in Society. I came to understand that words are signs. Suddenly i began to realize what Krishnamurti said "the word is not the same as the object that it points to". Let me take you with me on my tour of understanding.

Vygotsky mentions a very young child, stretching his fingers to grasp an object. But the object is too far away from the child. Then, the mother comes to the child's aid, and gives it to him. So there are in fact two movements; one is from the child, the other one is from the child's environment. Note that it is not the object responding, it is the environment, in this case the mother.

So when these two movements are internalized and become one, the stretching becomes pointing and the movement from the environment becomes an expectation, a demand or request to the child's environment to finish the action.

I realized that words are effectively the same mechanism of internalization. The very young child senses an object and the mother says the name of the object.

So when these two movements are internalized and become one, the sensing becomes labeling and the movement from the environment becomes an expectation, a demand or request to the child's environment to finish the action.

Can you feel the implications? To me it means that whatever word i use, the word itself is not me, is my call upon environment to understand what i mean. My part of the internalized movement is the sensing of the object.

So dialogue is not about words in the sense of "a word is an internalized single movement of what used to be my own sensing plus the environment's labeling". Dialogue is about my own sensing in a "conversation" with your own sensing; basically it goes without words while speaking.

Sunday, May 22, 2005

I look very much forward to this development. Latest issue#29 from WIE Magazine has a special called "Is God All in the Head?". In this special an interview with Andrew Newberg, who also appeared in the film What The Bleep Do We Know?.

Newberg did neurological measurements on people who meditate. He found a location in the head brain called "posterior parietal lobe" that is much less pronounced during the meditation session than before. It is this area that gives us a sense of boundary between ourselves and the rest of the world.

Friday, May 20, 2005

The club Attention as a Product has two questions:(1) What is attention?(2) How to make attention into a product?

When i started the club Xmas 2004 - only six months ago - i had no idea where this journey would bring us. All i had in mind was to create attention as a product. What i envision is attention accessible for all people at close to zero cost, like clean water and electricity in some parts of the world. For this to happen, attention could become a utility function, provided by the government. So it has to be on the political agenda; and for that to happen it must be on the scientifical agenda; and for that to happen we need to find out what attention is and how to operationalize it, how to make attention measureable. This journey, as presented backwards in time, is what i had in mind when i started the club.

Meanwhile, i have come to the conclusion that we, the members, are in fact one of the products. By this i mean that when we ask the question, in this club and in other clubs like Intellectualize, Belief Management etc, we start to shift paradigm, from 'Business is Business is a zero sum game' towards the Ecademy values like 'winning by sharing' which is a non-zero game.

These days i consider attention as a product to be like pepper. You don't eat a kilo of pepper, what you are looking for are people who create a recipe with pepper as an ingredient. This may or may not be a deviation from the original path. For me as one of the members, i have come up with the idea of an Attention Institute, where this changed perspective may be taught to the aforementioned recipe creators.

As an example: i invited Marcus Cauchi to tell us about his recipe which is the Sandler Sales Training. Marcus has contributed tremendously in my view by accepting my invitation and actively helping us to understand what attention is.

So now i think i begin to understand Sandler. Sandler is about the duality of seller and buyer, is about maximizing the attention on the seller part and minimizing the attention on the buyer part. And now i can return the offer. To create a market for Sandler Sales Training, I could create the opposite, which i could call the Pandit Purchase Training.

When you as a buyer meet someone who is trained in Sandler, you are effectively without any defense. So you need to attend the purchase training. Then, if you meet a salesrep trained in Sandler, you know what to do. Whereas, if you meet a salesrep who has not been trained in Sandler, then the other guy is effectively without any defense.

This scenario is just one out of five in Game Theory. It is the zero-sum play, where only one can win. By creating this opposite training, you have now two trainings instead of one. Sales on both trainings increase because of the zero-sum included in this concept.

Now for the implementation of Game Theory as a non-zero game. If both players are competitive, you can only implement zero-sum solutions like the one above. Nothing wrong with that, it is the current business paradigm. If one player is competitive and the other is cooperative, then the latter looses the game because the competitor does not understand cooperation, it is simply outside the paradigm of winning or losing. The most effective strategy for a cooperative person to deal with a competitor is the tit-for-tat strategy : imitate whatever the other person is doing.If both players are cooperating, then it becomes possible to create a non-zero game like 'winning by sharing'. Then, instead of two opposite trainings, you can create a third training, in which the rules of play for the unity of seller and buyer are taught. This is where you enter the new paradigm, this is where the Green Bank give loans to women in mid African villages to buy one cellphone and make money.

I hope i'm not losing you here. To me the end of my road is perfectly clear. Our dialogue is about the intermediate steps which are unclear to me. And the dialogue is about your personal life goals, which may be a totally different road, and yet there may be elements inside that cooperate with elements of other member's roads.

It is the winning by sharing concept, and i try to implement it and get it to become alive.